March, 2019: Dr. Susan Sangha
Dr. Sangha in her lab at Purdue University.
Dr. Susan Sangha is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences at the Purdue University Institute for Integrative Neuroscience. Before starting her own lab in Purdue, Dr. Sangha received her PhD from the University of Calgary in the lab of Dr. Ken Lukowiak and completed separate postdoctoral fellowships under Dr. Hans-Christian Pape and Dr. Patricia Janak. Dr. Sangha and her students combine elegant behavior with in vivo single-unit electrophysiology and pharmacogenetics to understand how the brain changes during fear, safety, and reward cue learning.
What project are you currently most excited about in your lab?
Right now, we have some exciting neural data from the PFC collected in freely behaving rats during our safety learning task. At the single neuron level, we are seeing many neurons in the infralimbic cortex responding to a learned safety cue while fear behavior is being suppressed.
What challenges, if any, have you experienced as a woman in learning?
I feel like I have been overall quite lucky to have had really supportive mentors, both male and female, throughout my career. However, when I got my faculty position and was the ‘boss’ of the lab and classroom, it appeared to me I was not getting the same level of respect from students, in the classroom and in the lab, as a new male PI would.
What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago?
That would be 2009, when I finished my first postdoc and was starting my second postdoc. The thing I did right was take a chance and start my line of research on safety learning. The advice I would give myself would probably be “ok, breathe, relax, it’ll all be fine”. I was too stressed about getting the faculty position. I obviously succeeded in getting one, but life would have been fine if I didn’t.
What’s your favorite pie?
I don’t like pie. I do like chocolate cake though.
What’s your favorite season?
Fall, I go gaga over colorful fall foliage.
What’s your ideal Saturday out of the office?
Being outside, taking photos and playing with my dog. I don’t live near mountains anymore but a hike in the mountains would be a perfect Saturday.
What do you love about the Pavlovian Society?
Over the years, it has become to me an interactive and supportive community filled with other learning nerds.
Dr. Sangha hiking in Iceland. “This was the first time I left the lab for an extended period of time. I had no cell or internet service for 10 days; I was nervous to do it, but the lab did just fine!”
This page was developed by Peter Euclide (peter.euclide@uwsp.edu) and maintained by Sydney Trask (trask@uwm.edu). A complete record of the Pavolvian Society’s Featured Faculty series can be found at https://sydneytrask.github.io/Featured_Faculty.html